


Recreational Cartography

by twistedchick



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:11:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair tries to read Jim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recreational Cartography

He's not perfect.

Like this is a surprise, after the last four years?

Okay. I knew about the temper, the hyperactive senses, the allergies, the attitudes. I got those figured out in the first six months or so, for the most part, even if they did keep coming up to kick me in the ass in new ways after that. Never knew anyone who could come up with more variations on fear-based responses; there's probably a dissertation right there, if someone wanted to write it, if only on the house rules alone.

No. No way. Forget it. I'm not writing that one.

But I'm not talking about the inner Jim now, the one who cuts to the chase like Alexander slicing the Gordian knot regardless of where the pieces will fall-- unless the knot is in his own psyche, in which case it takes the equivalent of shamanic brain surgery to get anywhere. Maybe it's more like veterinary dentistry, trying to pull the sore tooth on an upset panther without being mauled.

Hmm. Not a bad comparison, that one. I'll have to make a note of it. Just because I'm done with the diss doesn't mean I won't continue taking notes. All experience yields information; it all has to be useful sometime.

Speaking of useful, I should check the books. Is there a recipe for some kind of herbal shamanic panther novocaine equivalent?

Anyway, that's not what I was talking about. Just like the rest of us, he's flawed, even if he looks so perfect.

That's the fabrication, the obfuscation, the lie to the world at large that I've seen through, finally. If I'd figured it out a while back, I would have had a lot easier time working with him. I mean, Jim works with his senses all the time, and sense memory is a strong motivator in his life. Without a doubt, a lot of his fear-based reactions are rooted in physically painful memories of events that he doesn't want to relive.

The problem is in reading the map.

I can do that, now, to a degree. When he's asleep, after we've made love, when he's cuddled down into his pillow with his arm around me and I'm still awake, I can trace the thin silvery lines of healed scars on his skin, the places where his past has intersected with his body in ways that can't be erased. I don't pry; I just notice what mark is where and what it looks like. Some are so old and invisible that I can barely find them under my fingertips.

A few of them I know about: bullet holes, burns, cuts from knife fights, the odd skin texture that comes after serious abrasions, a few small dents in his hard skull when he's been hit too often. Those happened in the last few years. I saw them occur. Often as not, he was getting in the way of something meant for me.

I have a few to match them, but nothing like what he carries. Most of my scars were on the inside, and they're healing nicely, thank you, with his help. I'd like to think that some of his inside scars are doing better also. He's smiling more than he used to, he relaxes when he's not working, and he lets that quiet, straight-man sense of humor loose a lot more often.

But it's the physical, visible scars that I wonder about, late at night when he's asleep.

Where did that long jagged gash on his leg come from? Barbed wire? Was that one that he received as a kid, getting tangled in someone's barbed-wire fence -- or did it come from a sharp edge of metal when the chopper crashed in Peru? Or how about the line on his arm, near the elbow, that looks way too much as if a hot knife slid through butter there, but the butter was his arm muscle? That one makes my stomach curl just to look at it, but when I did ask him about it he shrugged and said, "Ranger operation. Classified," and his face went remote, so I didn't ask any more.

There's one on his stomach, so faint it's hard to see except when the light skims his muscles at just the right angle for the pale line to show against the abdominals. It's old, but it looks like a relic of a switchblade fight. I know he got into a few when he was undercover. He doesn't talk about those days if he can help it. He'll say a little in a general way, if he thinks it will help me on the job at the P.D., but that part of his life is on the section of the map marked 'private property.'

As it should be. Some things I have no need to know.

On his back, behind his left shoulder, there are parallel marks, straight lines of cuts, very faint. A surgery scar from a bullet wound runs across them, but doesn't obliterate them. It's hard to tell what they might have been from, those three lines. I think they may have been from before the Rangers, they're so pale. He has bullet wounds elsewhere as well, a couple of creases on his scalp where the hair grew back just a little differently. There's another on his biceps, and in his thigh where the bullet just missed the bone and the surgeons worked on him for hours to repair the damage. The scars from those crease the skin over the hard muscles, emphatic words in an unspoken language.

With all this, he's remarkably unselfconscious. He is what he is, and his body is what it is, and that's that. He doesn't flinch at wearing jogging shorts in the summer or hide the marks under a bigger shirt at the gym or in the park. The scars are part of him, a little bit of his history, the same as the fine smile lines around his eyes.

No, wait. They're more than that.

Jim has a trunk that he bought when he was in the military, and he uses it to hold things he doesn't want in plain sight. It's not that the contents are shameful or dangerous, just that they're a bit more private than anything else. Some of them are mementos from when he was growing up, like the awards he won in high school sports. Some are letters; I've seen the edge of the envelopes, tied in neat stacks, when he occasionally opens the trunk to put something in or out. Not everything always stays in storage; when Stephen came over, Jim brought out things he thought his brother might remember, photos and a few keepsakes, so they'd have something to talk about if all else failed.

Most of the trunk, though, is military. It holds his papers, his old uniform folded neatly, and his medals and commendations.

I've spent enough time around military types that I know how important the medals are. At the best of times they're the visible evidence of the inward achievement. The small ribbons live on the uniform as part of it; the bigger medals themselves are worn only on special occasions. If you're on the subway going through Washington, D.C., especially the line that goes past the Pentagon, you get used to seeing a lot of uniformed military officers with rows of ribbons on their shirts. It's just part of the uniform, a shorthand way of telling each other who they are.

From a behavioral viewpoint, it's kind of like dogs sniffing each other, if you think about it, though it'd be worth my life to say that aloud to anyone other than Jim. That kind of symbolism is taken way too seriously for me to want to mess with it.

Jim brings out his uniform once a year to get it cleaned, then folds it up and puts it away again. Last year I asked him to put it on just so I could see how he looked in it, and he was in a good enough mood that he did it. It still fit, perfectly. He looked stunning. For a long moment all I could see was the Ranger, the dedicated soldier with a chest full of bright ribbons, until he smiled and it was Jim again.

I asked him to tell me what all the ribbons were, and he named them for me: this one for a certain elite military exercise, this one for something else. He had everything from a Good Conduct medal up to a Purple Heart, though he wouldn't tell me what half of them were for. He did say the Good Conduct medal didn't mean he was always a good boy, just on duty, and gave me his wickedest grin. But when it came to the Purple Heart, he pointed to a scar on his shoulder and another on his leg, and said that was all he could legally tell me, as the rest was classified.

Maybe I'm reading too much anthropological theory into this. I've been accused of that, often enough. I look at those medals and think of tribal scarification, of tattoos, of rites of passage and attainment in warrior societies. In many warrior societies the event that makes you a warrior, an adult, marks you visibly in some way so that others can see it. It could be tattooing, or circumcision, or a change in the way you wear your hair, or a piece of jewelry or an emblem that you're allowed to wear only after you've met the great challenge and passed it.

I think Jim wears his medals on his skin, without the ribbons. It's as if he's managed to internalize what has happened to him, the things he's done and the things he's achieved, until he doesn't need the outward 'tribal' manifestation of them on his clothing.

Outward symbols aren't that important to him, in daily life. He doesn't need it to prove where he's been or who he is. Most of the time, now, he'd rather be ignored and just get his work done, but he doesn't always have that choice. Very occasionally, when there's a case that warrants it, those outward symbols are tools that get him into a place where he can obtain the information he needs; they're an entry key to a private club that the rest of us aren't allowed into. But as soon as he's used those tools, that entry key, and gotten what he wanted, they're put away again, out of sight. He doesn't need the reminders.

In some ways, Jim's world has shrunken a lot since he left the Rangers. He's not traveling the world any more, wandering familiarly in foreign ports. He doesn't have that daily acquaintance with thousands of other military moving through similar places, the immediate connection with Point Barrow or Rangoon or Addis Ababa, except when an old buddy stops by or when he calls on someone for help on a case. Except for trips to Canada, and the occasional venture to Peru or Mexico, he hasn't been away from the Pacific Northwest for more than a few days in years.

I think the senses have compensated for that, in that they allow him to know the area he's living in so thoroughly. He knows every inch of Cascade the way Samuel Clemens knew the Mississippi River as a pilot; he knows where to look for changes after the storms, and how to steer around the fallen trees and spars that point up out of the murky water. The storms he weathers and steers himself and me through are murders and rogue agents and gang warfare, not the Big Muddy. I'm more comfortable with it now that I'm a full detective working with him than I was as an observer, but there are still times when I'd rather face a six-foot channel catfish barehanded than the drug dealers and killers. When all's said and done, the catfish would at least provide a good meal for Major Crime afterward, instead of paperwork.

Jim's rolling over now, whuffling a little, making a sound that's more than heavy breathing, less than a snore. He's one of the quietest people I've ever slept in the same room with. Maybe it's from all his covert training, when snoring could get you killed, or maybe that aristocratic nose never had the built-in sub-woofers in the first place. I've wondered how it is that he's never gotten a broken nose, with all the fights he's been in, official and off-the-record. Just lucky, I guess. His hand reaches over to find some part of me to touch, to know that I'm there, and he pats my leg and holds on to the thigh just above the knee and drifts back to a deeper sleep.

Experience is supposed to teach us a lot, if we pay attention. That's how history works, teaching us the memories of the tribe as far back as writing and storytelling can go, so that General George Patton could use tactics employed by Julius Caesar two thousand years earlier to win battles on the same ground Caesar's legions fought on. You might say my degrees are in cultural history and storytelling, listening to the old stories and tracing the ancient maps, teasing out the lessons and drawing comparisons, and finding ways to show others how to do the same thing. I'd look at the differences in how the soldiers lived, what customs they had and how they survived from day to day, rather than just the battle plans. I'd map the culture of the place and how it was affected by the battles, not just the warfare itself. Even so, Patton and I would work from the same resources, the same maps; we'd just see different things in them.

It doesn't matter how the stories are transmitted: myth and legend and history can be oral, or pictorial, as well as written. That's why movies are so popular; they tell stories in pictures that we might not pay as much attention to if they were only in printed words. We need to see what has happened, sometimes, to learn. It doesn't matter if it's an actor portraying the truth for us on film or a newsreel of the event itself; both can tell a story that touches the soul.

Indiana Jones said, a long time ago, that it's not the years that count but the mileage. For myself, I'll keep studying this text, the pale marks of travel and experience, the body of work lying beside me warm and beloved, and try to learn as much as I can from the past so that I can keep more history from being written on him. If history is supposed to teach us anything, it's that we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past that have gotten us hurt.

And as I decide this, his eyes open.

"What's up, Chief? You all right?"

"I'm fine. Just looking at you."

"Nothing much to see."

"Only whole worlds, Jim. Only the universe."


End file.
